A photo tour of the rooftop beehives at the InterContinental Times Square in New York. The bees will produce honey that the hotel will use in its cocktails and food.

We always appreciate hotels’ efforts to treat Mother Nature well, and doubly so when those efforts involve delicious food. So, when the Intercontinental Times Square invited us to check out its brand new, rooftop beehive—which they’ll use to produce honey for specialty cocktails, salad dressings, cheese plates, and other goodies—we had to say yes. Click through for a peek at the operation, but shield your eyes if you’re scared of bees. We got pretty close to a few of them.

This tiny hive currently houses about 10,000 bees, but it has room for up to 50,000—a number it will reach as the queen bee hatches her eggs.

Beekeeper Zainal Chan (right) worked with the InterContinental Boston to set up its hives before helping the Times Square property. This is the brand’s third hotel to harvest honey (The Barclay also has a handful of hives).

The queen bee arrived in her very own chariot and was released into the hive before her minions. “The queen controls the rest of the bees,” Rubin says. “When we took her out, they all went right into the hive.”

The goal is to install up to four hives in this area by 2013 and to produce up to 30 pounds of honey in the next year—no small feat given that each bee produces only a thimble-full of the stuff in her lifetime. When the hive produces enough honey, Rubin plans to drizzle it on cheese plates, mix it into salad dressings, and use it as a glaze on racks of lamb. “I would hope to use it more directly,” Rubin says. “I want you to taste our honey.”